14 DAY TRIAL // Jiri Slaby, the maintainer of the 3.12 kernel series, has announced earlier today that a new maintenance release is available for all users of this LTS (Long Term Support) Linux kernel.
According to the changelog, Linux kernel 3.12.43 LTS is a massive update that brings improvements and fixes bugs in all areas, including architectures (ARC, ARM, ARM64, c6x, MIPS, PowerPC, s390, SPARC, UniCore32, x86, and Xtensa), filesystems (Btrfs, EXT4, NILFS2, and OCFS2), networking (IPv4), sound, and virtualization (KVM).
Additionally, the new maintenance release of Linux kernel 3.12 brings numerous updated drivers for USB, ACPI, TTY, SPI, SCSI, PINCTRL, MTD, MMC, Memory Stick, InfiniBand, I2C, Bluetooth, General-purpose input/output (GPIO), and GPU (Intel i915 and Radeon).
"I'm announcing the release of the 3.12.43 kernel. All users of the 3.12 kernel series must upgrade," says Jiri Slaby. "The updated 3.12.y git tree can be browsed at the normal kernel.org git web browser: http://git.kernel.org/?p=linux/kernel/git/stable/linux-stable.git;a=summary."
The EXT4 data corruption issue has been patched
As you might have guessed, the famous EXT4 data corruption issue that plagued previous versions of almost all Linux kernel branches has been patched in this maintenance release of Linux kernel 3.12, which means that you should upgrade your installation as soon as the packages become available in the main software repositories of your distribution.
While the rest of the world can only wait for the new kernel update to become live in their favorite Linux distributions, this announcement is targeted mainly towards distro developers/maintainers who need to update the kernel packages as soon as possible. As usual, you can download Linux kernel 3.12.43 LTS right now via Softpedia or from the kernel.org website.